


Hunky Dory

by skeeno



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Life on Mars AU?, M/M, The 1990s and Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-05 22:41:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12198846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeeno/pseuds/skeeno
Summary: "There was a supermodel calendar on the fridge.  It was April 14, 1998, apparently, complete with some weird half-naked photo of Kate Moss, an appointment at 165 University Avenue, and superfloppys.  For some fucking reason.  Again, Richard was probably in Hell."





	1. Changes

**Author's Note:**

> 165 University Ave is the real place where Google, PayPal, and Logitech, among others, had their first non-garage offices. Hooli was never an occupant, from what I can tell.
> 
> Also, turns out David Bowie didn't release any music in 1998.

Richard’s head hit the ground and it felt like Melcher had driven an axe through it.He couldn’t see- this was a problem, because he could feel that his eyes were open, and that he couldn’t close them.He couldn’t move at all, in fact.He heard Jared saying his name, over and over, but nothing else.

All he could think before everything went blank was “Of fucking course.”

 

When he wakes up, he’s not on the ground, or in the hospital.He’s face down in a pillow, and his head doesn’t hurt."Torn" is playing on a tinny speaker near his head. 

It’s up in the air as to whether this is more worrying than a moment ago.

At least when he was sure he was dead, he knew what was going on. Not that dying had been particularly great, or anything, but at least for those few moments you knew where you stood.Things were settled, even though it hadn’t been very dignified.This felt a lot like Richard was going to have to make choices.

The first one was whether or not to get up, which was harder than he expected it to be.The bed he was in wasn’t all that comfortable, but it was certainly better than dealing with whatever was going on.Richard had just done a lot of terrible stuff not too long ago, and if this was an afterlife of some variety, then the version of Hell they got in Confirmation Class seemed a lot more likely than Gilfoyle’s version.Especially if the soundtrack was late 90's soft rock.

He didn't get a chance to decide by the time someone started pounding on the door to whatever room he was in.

“Richard! Phone’s for you!” someone shouted.

He almost fell off the bed in shock after he jerked upright.

It was the fucking Hacker Hostel.His room at the Hacker Hostel.

The walls were dark blue, not grey, and he was on a normal bed frame, not a loft bed, but it was unmistakably the same room.

“Richard!” the same voice yelled again, and Richard stumbled out of the room on autopilot, still in the t-shirt and boxers he’d apparently been wearing to bed.Some guy with a dirty blond ponytail - rocking fucking 501s and a black turtleneck - was holding out an actual phone receiver on a cord attached to the wall in the kitchen, looking pissed.Richard took it like it might burn his hand.

“Hello?”

“Richard?” some male voice on the other end of the line asked, and Richard mumbled his reply, looking through the window into the main room.There was still a big work table, but it was covered in CRT monitors sitting next to massive grey plastic computer towers, like a fever dream of his old middle school LAN parties.The Steve Jobs cosplayer had taken a seat to break down an honest to god Iomega Zip drive.With actual superfloppys. 

“This is Gavin Belson, from Hooli.”

Richard promptly decided that if this was Hell, the devil was doing a great job.

 

When he got off the phone, Steve Jobs told him to go turn off his alarm, still pissed.He went back to his room and did so, even though he had pretty much forgotten how clock radios worked in the years since 2005, and got dressed. Every shirt in his closet was absolutely massive; he ended up wearing his standard uniform of a button down under a sweater, but it was at least two sizes too big, and the only clean pants he could find had a six button fly that ended around the belly button.The only good thing he could say about it was that it went very well with the Nokia brick phone he found on his nightstand next to the wallet with the RadioShack receipts in it. 

Steve Jobs was thankfully not still mad when Richard left his room.He had migrated to the kitchen to eat French Toast Crunch at the island, reading a review of the original Half-Life in what Richard had to assume was the most recent issue of WIRED.

"Did you get the job?"he asked, as Richard walked in.

"Yeah, I'm heading over there in a bit to get shown around."Richard replied, and Steve Jobs hummed as he turned to the Quake II review on the next page. 

There was a supermodel calendar on the fridge.It was April 14, 1998, apparently, complete with some weird half-naked photo of Kate Moss, an appointment at 165 University Avenue, and superfloppys.For some fucking reason.Again, Richard was probably in Hell.

“When do you need to be over there?”Steve asked, interrupting Richard's thoughts.Richard checked the monstrosity of a digital watch he’d also found on his bedside table.“It’s only on University.Like a twenty minute walk?I should be good if I leave in a few.”

Richard felt like he was keeping it together remarkably well. He’d never been a great actor, but the nerves he should have been feeling about the job offer from budding tech giant Hooli did a pretty good job of covering up the actual nerves he was feeling about probably being dead or in a coma or whatever.  He could practically hear Jared reminding him about the ethos of Meinhertzhagen’s Haversack.Hopefully the guy bought it.Hopefully Gavin fucking Belson bought it.

“I can drop you off.” Steve Jobs said.

"Yeah, just one second." Richard replied, before walking to the bathroom as fast as he could.

 

As promised, after Richard had thrown up and brushed his teeth, Steve dropped him off in front of a door sandwiched between a frozen yogourt place and an indie book store. The old green Hooli logo was stuck to the glass was the only indication he'd come to the right place.Inside, he took the stairs three at a time, lingering trauma from Winnie's apartment be damned. 

The office was cramped.  It was all one room, full of weirdly placed columns with cheap IKEA desks in between them and people sitting behind those familiar big CRT monitors.From what Richard remembered, Hooli outgrew the place soon.

"Hey! Richard, right?"Gavin fucking Belson shouted, waving from his spot at his own big CRT in corner of the room.Thankfully, Richard was slightly less likely to throw up in any given situation these days, even when gagging, so he waved back as Gavin loped over to shake his hand. 

Just 1998 would have been a fucking trip.Everything up to that point was already like a set decorator's idea of what he remembered from being ten.Distantly familiar, but almost too similar to his biggest memories. Ersatz Steve Jobs and the Hacker Hostel was like a parody of what a tech guy and his house looked like during the bubble. Soon Bill Clinton was going to come on the TV/VCR in the corner and someone would bust out the bop-it and moon shoes. It was easier to come up with explanations for that that he was more comfortable with. Dream. Coma dream. Whatever weird version of your life flashing before your eyes during a near-death experience that this represented. But Gavin Belson and Peter Gregory were people he knew, from either a year and a half ago or sixteen years from now, and he didn't trust his de-oxygenated brain to be good enough to get "two of the top ten technological minds of the last thirty years, but as twentysomethings" right on the first try. That didn't leave many options.

He really didn't want to be in Hell.  

“We’re actually moving out right now.” Gavin said, waving a hand at the piles of milk crates that had been stacked against the wall of the garage.He was the one doing pretty much all of the talking as they got Richard set up.“We have a line on some real offices, but you’re the last new hire for a while, so we figured you could fit in here with us."

"Yeah, no problem."Richard said, and then, just because he could- "On Embarcardero, right?"

"Yeah!"Gavin said."We haven't found anyone to take over this lease quite yet, but it should only be a few months." 

It was so disorienting that he was so young.Twenty-eight, maybe?In a Rush t-shirt and even more 501s, still dressing like a college kid.Richard couldn't remember exactly how old everyone had been at this point in time, but at twenty-seven he was one of the older guys in the room, and definitely the only one in business casual.Plus, he couldn't get it out of his head that he did know exactly what happened.What would happen. Hooli had taken the building over from Logitech in '97.In ten months Hooli's office space would be ready, and fucking Google would take over their lease, cementing the legend of the building. Richard had come to see it on his first day at Stanford, like a tech pilgrimage, and now he was standing in it with one of its most famous tenants.

Maybe the worst part was that he couldn't stop himself from looking over at Peter Gregory.While Gavin had been weirdly nice in helping Richard find a three pound mechanical keyboard and rollerball mouse for his new computer, and the other engineers had been chatting with Hooli's newest recruit, Peter was silent, attentive to what looked like some of those minimal message-oriented transport layers that had made Hooli so different.But just like Gavin, he was an eerily accurate Muppet Babies version of the real thing. 

"Pete! Come and say hello!" Gavin said at his back.

"Hello." Peter said, without taking his eyes off his monitor.

Gavin rolled his eyes. Peter turned around just in time to see him do it, and almost smirked at him.

Richard would have been even more weirded out by Peter Gregory giving Gavin Belson a hard time in an actually friendly way than almost anything else so far.  However, he was more preoccupied by the sudden shrieking noise and the incredible pain over his right ear.


	2. Oh! You Pretty Things

"Richard. Richard. Richard."

For a second, Richard could have sworn it was Jared talking, but soon it resolved into Gavin's voice, just higher and lighter than he was used to. The shrieking noise, like his ears were ringing, slowly receded, but Richard stayed bent over, hands on his knees. He was nauseous, which was nothing new, but the light in the room was pulsing strangely, brighter and darker.

"Does this happen often?"

He looked up and saw Peter had come over to stand next to Gavin, in his pleated khakis and big navy t-shirt. Gavin, at least, looked surprised, if not concerned, which was a nice change from his 2010s baseline of active hostility. Peter was looking at him like he always had, the same way he looked at burndown rates and Portuguese cork futures. That was a little more unnerving.

"Jesus, Pete. Are you okay, Richard?" Gavin asked, and Richard nodded, straightening up and wincing.

"Are you having vision problems? Any nausea?" Peter asked, undeterred, and Richard blinked the flashing lights away. Funny he should say that, and it almost sounded like an echo of another voice, the way Gavin had sounded like Jared for that one moment.

"Pete, for fuck's sake, give him a moment. He's a person." Gavin said, longsuffering.

"I am aware. If he weren't a person he wouldn't have symptoms for me to ask about." Peter fired back. It was as close to emotive as Richard had ever seen the man. He sighed, and leaned against his desk behind him as Peter and Gavin kept bickering. The symptoms, as Peter called them, faded out.

"I'm fine." Richard half-yelled, which got the sniping to stop. "I'm good, I promise. Just a migraine."

"You should seek medical attention." Peter said, and Richard had to repress a shudder. Something told him he wasn't going to figure out what was wrong with him or what was going on with the 90's version of his useless doctor.

"I'm good."

Peter and Gavin both leveled looks at him that were so similar to how skeptical of him they would both be in 2014 that Richard almost had to laugh. He had never actually seen them together, from what he could remember. It was striking, having all of those brains focused in one direction.

"I promise." People started looking away from Richard and back at their monitors, and Gavin and Peter both relaxed slightly.

"Okay. Well, welcome aboard." Gavin said with finality, and then turned to Peter. "He’s your guy, so I figured you wanted him with you on QA. See if you can take him through it without getting distracted." He said, little of his good humour from before remaining. A muscle in Peter’s jaw jumped as Gavin walked away, but he seemed as calm as ever when he turned back to Richard.

 

Thankfully, quality assurance was pretty routine stuff at any company, in any decade. He had been very good at it at Hooli as employee number 87 561 in 2014, on far more complicated code than was possible in 1998 as employee number 29. Especially after Peter walked him through his groundbreaking late ‘90s technology.

He got almost visibly frustrated when Richard didn't seem as impressed as he was supposed to be.

Eventually, they'd moved to Richard's brand new desk and ended up on small talk, or whatever passed for it with Peter, while Richard tried to revert to how he'd coded pre-puberty with Peter watching over his shoulder.

"You worked for Jack Barker." Peter said, which was technically true, in a sense, but not really a question. Richard replied in the affirmative anyway, without looking away from his hunt for a missing bracket. Peter may have been a brilliant idea guy, but he couldn’t really code for shit. He’d already spent five minutes replacing spaces with tabs.

"You worked on data compression." Also true. Also not a question.

"You come very highly recommended on that score." he asked, quietly enough that no one else could hear, and Richard felt his stomach clench, flashing back to the dates on Peter's notebooks, choosing not to think about who could possibly recommend him in 1998. He turned around to look up at Peter, who looked as intense and focused as Richard had ever seen him.

"Do you– um– do you need me to take a look at something?"

 

They went out for lunch down the street at an alarmingly familiar Mexican restaurant, where they knew Peter by name, to talk about it. Richard swallowed hard when they sat them at pretty much the same table he’d gotten to know so well.

When they had ordered, and Richard had pointedly avoided cilantro in order to satisfy the Jared living at the back of his mind, Peter pulled out a notebook that was far less weathered than the last time Richard had seen it. Richard had to pretend to read it while Peter looked on intently.

While he read, he was slipping deeper into his head.

He wasn't sure whether he liked the implications of talking about this with Peter. Time travel was one of the options he was pretty much ruling out for what was happening to him, but it was impossible to really know. He could be Quantum Leaping. Astral projecting, X-Files style. Maybe there was a Richard Hendricks who really _was_ Hooli employee 29. Maybe he looked like Scott Bakula right now and just hadn’t seen his reflection in a plate glass window yet. In which case, Meinhertzhagen's Haversack, right? No Richard Hendricks from 1998, no matter how good he was with compression, would be able to say what Richard could say about this idea, and that meant he probably shouldn't.

Plus, the whole reason he wanted to talk about this was the idea of talking about it with Peter. If this was a dream, or he was in a coma, and he wasn't going to change the future, then he'd just be talking to himself about his own idea. Actually talking to Peter was only possible if this was, in fact, a Quantum Leap type deal. Or worse, the afterlife. And if that was the case then a) it's not like Richard's going to be able to implement anything and b) he and Peter were stuck here with some construct of Gavin for eternity, meaning that it was definitely Hell.

Although: until this point he’d been operating under the assumption that playing along was what was going to lead to end of whatever this was. Waking up, going home, even just figuring out was going on. Like starting a video game blind and just following the loot towards the story. What if he actually had to do something? If Peter was talking to him about this, knew he was a compression guy, then that had to mean something. The ghost always needs to fulfill its outstanding business before it goes towards the light, right? Learn a lesson?

Fuck, he really did not want to be dead.

"Peter, this is great,” he finally said. Peter raised an eyebrow.

"Not totally impossible? Gavin had some choice words regarding the feasibility of the Weissman score required to make the idea work." He said, practically morose, and Richard shook his head, licking his lips and trying to psych himself up. It didn’t matter, right? Or if it did, it could make all the difference.

“I – uh – I have something that might be able to help, actually. With that. Just something I was working on- on- on my own.” Then he took the pen clipped to Peter’s notebook, drew out his best visualization of middle-out on a spare napkin and handed it over.

He hadn’t gotten to see how Peter had reacted when he heard about middle-out. Monica had said he was happy with it, but he didn’t know if he was proud of Richard, if he had any suggestions, even what his more complex thoughts were. When he’d died, Richard hadn’t even known that Peter had theorized about his new internet idea. So he waited with bated breath as Peter considered what he’d drawn.

“I have no idea what this is.” He finally said. Richard could feel his face twitching.

“Are you alright?” Peter asked. “Has your headache gone away?” It hadn’t, not fully, and some sounds still seemed weirdly layered, like the kitchen door swinging open twice, or the siren on the street, but that wasn’t the issue at the moment.

“Fine. I’m fine.” He snapped. “Peter, it’s a compression method. I call it middle-out compression.”

Peter looked at the napkin again, brow furrowed, and the penny didn't drop.

“How does it work?” He asked, and Richard rubbed a knuckle into his eye, huffing with frustration. It would have been really convenient if Peter wasn’t like everybody else.

“It’s like Minesweeper. You click in the middle and then calculate probabilities for eliminating adjacent blocks until you find the edges. But done in parallel on different blocks.” He said, and Peter still looked confused, but suddenly interested, the way all of the other VCs did when Richard tried explaining the tech.

“What’s its Weissman score?”

Richard prevaricated, since 1998 didn’t exactly have the processing power to implement the machine learning that made the newest version of Pied Piper so effective.

“3.8. So far. Your idea is possible, Peter, I swear to god." Richard said, and Peter closed his eyes, triumphant.

“Richard, I must confess that I hired you for your expertise in this field. Of course, I could not expect this level of progress on the idea this early.” He looked downright giddy, by Peter Gregory standards, but he sobered quickly. “However, we would need Gavin’s approval if I were to continue this project at Hooli, which I am not entirely certain of. He owns…” The patent. The fucking patent. Like that mattered, no matter where they were or what was happening.

“Gavin fucking Belson.” Richard blurted out, with venom, immediately regretting it. Peter looked surprised at his outburst, and Richard had to rush to cover.

“It’s just – he doesn’t need to control everything you do, Peter. I know you’re your own man. I mean, the tech alone is maybe the most important thing in the future of computer science. You know that. I know you know that. You don't need him. I know you've been friends forever, though I don't know _why, but_  you’re letting Gavin just – just - I already know exactly what I would do, for this tech to work out, okay? And it's way more than ditching Gavin fucking Belson. He's fucking you. You're getting fucked, if you don't follow through with this idea.”

Peter stared at him as he trailed off, lips pressed tight together. Richard had always understood why Gavin might once have needed Peter. Peter had had maybe the most famous knack for predicting tech breakthroughs in the industry. The opposite had never been quite so true. Richard had really just never seen the point of a Steve Jobs like Gavin Belson when the Steve Wozniak was as capable as Peter was.

“Well that's certainly an apropos way of framing the issue.” Peter finally said. "If you would let me finish?"

 

Steve Jobs isn’t in any of the public areas when Richard got home from work that day. All that seemed to remain of him was the work table detritus and a note on the fridge that told him to help himself to shitty Chinese food, signed “J”. He did so, and then did a little more shell-shocked moping that he hadn't been able to get done at Hooli in his room. He had yet another 4:3, 20-inch tv with a built in VCR in there that he watched while getting up real close to see the little cells of red, green, and blue on the screen, and marvelling at the idea of new episodes of Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The news was especially suited to his mood. Peter Jennings sounded just like he used to when his parents would put him on in the living room to cover up the silence in kitchen while they ate dinner. He settled in on the ground-level bed and watched old news about recent developments in the Monica Lewinsky scandal for half an hour before he couldn’t really stand anymore. When Richard stood up to turn him off, however, he stood stock-still.

“Now we turn to Silicon Valley, and the tech boom.” Richard’s own face, the uncomfortable shot from the website’s official bios, was edited into the circuit board graphic in the box over Jennings’ right shoulder. As if his day wasn't bad enough.

“Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks was assaulted yesterday, following his affair with his attacker’s fiancée. Hendricks has recently been displaying some rather erratic behaviour in recent weeks. He’s managed to totally fuck up his new venture after the near total failure of his company’s namesake compression platform three months ago, and his most recent self-sabotaging attempt at romance. This included teaming up with noted rival Gavin Belson, and more and more frequent panic attacks and dissociative episodes.” Peter Jennings said, with total seriousness, like he wasn’t the only person other than Richard that knew that last part.

“What the fuck.” Richard said.

“Of course, all of those relationships he’s ruined might be recovered, if he would just wake up.”

“Seriously. What –“ he said, reaching for the tv.

“Richard. Wake the fuck up.” That didn’t sound like Peter Jennings, even though his lips were moving.

“Come on, dude.” Peter Jennings didn’t have a Pakistani accent, from what he remembered.

The tv fizzled off before he had a chance to touch it. When he turned it back on, Peter Jennings was just Peter Jennings, and Dinesh and Gilfoyle were gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short list of some more things my Borderline Gen Z ass has researched for this fic, some of which I ended up using:  
> \- Articles in the April 1998 issue of Wired.  
> \- Billboard hits of 1998.  
> \- The history of microprocessors.  
> \- Causes of the tech crash of 2000-02.  
> \- Corporate structure of Hewlett-Packard.  
> \- What everybody's name means.  
> \- Solutions to the Y2K problem.  
> \- The fuck is a superfloppy?  
> \- Tornado breakouts in Oklahoma.  
> \- Traumatic brain injury.  
> \- Travel times in Palo Alto.  
> \- Late 90s newscasters. Peter Jennings is Canadian!  
> \- French Toast Crunch. They seriously stopped making it in the US? What?  
> \- RadioShack.  
> \- Levis.  
> \- Where cork grows.
> 
> Side note: in my mind Richard's whole personality is defined by the bit where he worries for three straight paragraphs about what will happen if he tells Peter and then ends up just saying "fuck it" and doing it anyway.


End file.
